When a person suffers from a cardiac arrest, the blood is not circulating to nourish the body, which can lead to death of or cause severe bodily damages to the person. To improve the person's chances to survive or to minimize the damages at cardiac arrest it is essential to take necessary measures as quickly as possible to maintain the person's blood circulation and respiration, otherwise the person will succumb to sudden cardiac death in minutes. Such an emergency measure is cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), which is a combination of “mouth-to-mouth” or artificial respiration and manual or automatic cardiac compression that helps the person to breathe and maintains some circulation of the blood.
However, CPR does normally not restart the heart but is only used for maintaining the oxygenation and circulation of blood. Instead, defibrillation by electrical shocks is usually necessary to restart the normal functioning of the heart.
Thus, CPR has to be performed until the person has undergone electrical defibrillation of the heart. Today, CPR is often performed manually by one or two persons (rescuers), which is a difficult and demanding task, i.e. different measures have to be taken correctly at the right time and in the right order to provide a good result. Further, manual cardiac compression is quite exhausting to perform and especially if it is performed during an extended period of time. Furthermore, it is sometimes necessary to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation when transporting the person having a cardiac arrest, for example when transporting the person by means of a stretcher from a scene of an accident to an ambulance. In such a situation it is not possible to perform conventional CPR using manual CPR and the apparatuses today providing automatic CPR are not stable enough or easy to position to provide CPR on a person laying on for example a stretcher.